On Western Media and Palestine

This year has been similar to the last one for both Palestine and the mainstream Western media’s coverage of Israel’s ethnic cleansing and settler-colonial apartheid project against Palestinians. In May 2021, major Western media outlets continued to omit important historical and political context from their coverage of the 11-day Gaza Crisis in the occupied West Bank. Western media outlets including America’s most influential newspaper of record, the New York Times, continued to reject the idea of the Palestinians’ existence as a nation, decontextualized the Palestinian resistance, and pushed alternative interpretations to the margins, generally, absolving Israel of responsibility. This year was similar to the last year, the year before that, and so on.

That the American media treats Israel with “kid gloves” is a continuing discourse in academic circles and alternative media, especially in the context of Palestine. For instance, some studies have taken a critical account of pro-Israel reporting, mapping, and referencing strategies being used in Western media, and it shows a consistent pattern of selection, exclusion, and inclusion that, by and large, approves of Israeli rationales and expressions. For example, the construction of the first Palestinian intifada (1987-1991) in the US media was such that it was devoid of meaningful context integral to understanding the conflict dynamics.

Media is, therefore, the most significant marketplace of ideas and the notion of objectivity attached to it gives it the legitimacy to perpetuate ideologies and perceptions that are either deliberately or unconsciously in line with the interests of the ruling class i.e., the state. For example, the role the media plays in negative portrayals of the Palestinian resistance against Israel has produced a decontextualized image of the Palestinian struggle. The ideas that politically uninformed people are being socialized into regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict are those that benefit the political elite to maintain support for the US foreign policy on Israel.

March of 2022 and Shireen Abu Aqleh’s assassination in May 2022 by Israeli forces witnessed a similar pattern in the Western media. The language used to interpret and represent the conflict depicted a clear bias in favor of Israel. Below, I analyze three articles published in The New York Times in March 2022 that have contributed to the knowledge being disseminated across the globe in order to legitimize the Israeli apartheid and settler-colonial ambitions.

1^st March 2022: Palestinians Threatened With Eviction Can Stay in Their Homes — for Now, by Isabel Kershner in The New York Times

In this report, Isabel Kershner rightfully recognizes that the Israeli legal institutions are a part of a “wider Israeli effort to displace Palestinians from East Jerusalem in order to cement Israel’s claim to sovereignty there.” But at the same time, the author fails to acknowledge the political and colonial dimensions of the evictions by positing that “the land has powerful attachments to Palestinians and Jews.” Through this ignorance toward Israel’s settler-colonial ambitions in the Sheikh Jarrah evictions, Isabel Kershner is contributing to the knowledge designed to legitimize Israeli colonialism, thereby, helping proliferate epistemic violence against the Palestinians. The heedful use of language depicts violence through knowledge.

Kershner’s credibility is further weakened considering that her son served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and her father is a communication strategist for the Israeli regime. Apart from the fact that she never disclosed her son’s service in The New York Times, she shared an article last year by her husband, Hirsh Goodman, where he debunked the Human Rights Watch’s “claims” of Palestinian persecution by the IDF; he is also an ex-serviceman of IDF.

While Kershner highlighted a “legal double standard” that Palestinians have “no similar legal recourse to reclaim homes” but Israeli settlers can reclaim land, she reduced the eviction case to a “legalistic property dispute” between two parties, ignoring the political and colonial contexts again. Moreover, frequent use of words like “clashes” disregards the fact that if on one side, there are unarmed civilians with tiny rocks, and on the other side, there is a heavily equipped military funded by the US, it cannot be termed as a clash between two parties. If violence against devout worshippers at Al-Aqsa Mosque during the Ramadan of 2021 and 2022 is any indication, terming it as “clashes” makes no sense; instead, it exposes her unethical bias. Furthermore, Kershner fails to problematize the notion that an occupying power cannot evict the native population from their land, nor can it transfer its own population into the occupying land.

23^rd March 2022: U.N. Investigator Accuses Israel of Apartheid, Citing Permanence of Occupation by Patrick Kingsley in The New York Times

This article by Patrick Kingsley, The New York Times Bureau Chief in Jerusalem, on the United Nations special rapporteur’s report on Israeli apartheid in Palestine, is more like a statement brief of several Israeli officials’ response to the report. After introducing the report in one sentence, Kingsley brings up the ‘strong’ denial by “Israel and its supporters” of the United Nations report. The author further mentions several statements from the Israeli foreign ministry and government terming the UN report as “biased and baseless.” While a clear Israeli agency is referenced, there is no reference or source from the Palestinian side except “many Palestinians” that have appreciated the special rapporteur Michael Lynk’s efforts.

Moreover, Kingsley ignores some of the key aspects of Lynk’s advanced unedited version of the report where he explicitly lamented in the introduction that he was not granted access to the occupied territories, “nor have his requests to meet with the Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations been accepted.” It is also strange to note that the 18-page report was only worth two quotes in Kingsley’s article while the reactions from “Israel and its supporters” took most of the article’s space and attention. The erasure of Palestinian voices and frequent mentions of Israel’s official rationale indicates The New York Times’ media bias and deliberate strategy to serve the Zionist cause, as Noam Chomsky and Edward Said argued. This analysis is further strengthened if we look at Patrick Kingsley’s 27^th April 2021 article in The New York Times where he used a similar strategy by referencing one of Benjamin Netanyahu’s advisors, followed by the Israeli ambassador to Washington, the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the ex-head of Israel’s administration in the West Bank, and the president of a right-wing Israeli think tank. All of these sources denounced the apartheid accusations against Israel. However, unsurprisingly, at the end of the article, Kingsley labeled Amnesty International’s report “accusing Israel of apartheid” as an “outlier” which is inaccurate as many human rights organizations, intellectuals, activists and journalists acknowledged the Amnesty report.

23^rd March 2022: Ukraine War Ignites Israeli Debate Over Purpose of a Jewish State by Isabel Kershner in The New York Times

In this article, Isabel Kershner writes about Ukrainians seeking refuge in Israel and how it has stirred up a debate on whether allowing these refugees would threaten Israel’s Jewish character. Throughout the article, Kershner sings about Israeli values and morals, and how Ukrainian refugees feel safe in Israel. What is striking, even for authors like Kershner, is the absolute absence of Palestinians in the article. Not even once does the author mention the Palestinians living in areas occupied by Israel. While Israel might be safe for Ukrainians as Kershner claims, around 7 million Palestinian refugees are denied the right of returning to their homes under legal laws put forward by Israel.

The language that is used to represent the Israeli-Palestinian conflict shows that the consensus of media groups such as The New York Times and journalists like Isabel Kershner and Patrick Kingsley is based on denying the existence of the Palestinians as a nation, decontextualizing their resistance as terrorism, and using various media strategies to apparently ‘debunk’ the “accusations” of crimes committed by Israel against the native Palestinian population.